Small town churns out missiles, war over weather looms, Poles let saboteur skip

(Originally published Aug. 15 in “What in the World“) Drive about 10 kilometers east from the Camden, Arkansas (pop. 10,298)—out past the airfield, the driving range and the Tin Top Diner—and there you’ll find the beating heart of America’s military industrial complex.

This remote part of southern Arkansas has become something of a center for U.S. production of ammunition, including mortars, missiles and the solid-state motors used to propel them. Earlier this year, RTX (the company formerly known as Raytheon) and France’s Rafael broke ground on a new $33 million factory in the south Arkansas town of Camden to produce Tamir missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system.

And on Tuesday, General Dynamics announced that it would start producing solid-state motors at its own factory in Camden for Lockheed Martin’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, or Gmlrs—the precision guided missiles used by Lockheed’s Himars launchers.

Surging demand for new launchers and their ammunition, notably in Ukraine where they helped Kyiv turn the tables on Russia, have resulted in shortages of the motors that the new factory is meant to fill.

General Dynamics’ factory in Camden already produces Hellfire and Javelin anti-tank missiles, as well as 120mm mortar rounds. The company produces its 155mm artillery shells, which have also been suffering an acute global shortage, at a factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and is ramping up production at a new factory in Mesquite, Texas.

But Camden is also where Lockheed Martin makes its Mlrs launch systems, including the Gmlrs and the Himars launchers. It’s also where it makes both the Pac-3 missiles for the Patriot air-defense batteries and the long-range Army Tactical Missile System, or Atacm—the missiles Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lobbied so hard to convince U.S. President Joe Biden to finally let it have and then let it fire them across the border at targets inside Russia.

Both General Dynamics’ and Lockheed Martin’s factories are located just 10 kilometers east of town in East Camden’s Highland Industrial Park, conveniently near the Ooda Ranch Gun Range and the New Hope Cemetery. Even Germany’s Rheinmetall has a factory nearby. So does Aerojet Rocketdyne.

Why Camden? Surprisingly, it’s not the Tin Top’s club sandwiches and seasoned fries, though those do earn raves. Or next week’s scheduled opening of the Beard and Buns Burger Co. Most missile-factory workers commute in to work from as far away as Little Rock 160km to the north.

Turns out Camden is where, during World War II, the U.S. Navy built a factory for torpedoes, bombs and other explosives. Those bombs are long gone, but the underground bunkers it built there are still vital to today’s factories.

There’s also a local community college, South Arkansas University, that trains so many potential factory workers for the companies that a few years ago it changed its mascot from the Varmints to the Rockets.

All those missiles keep finding new demand: in Ukraine, where Kyiv has managed to divert some Russian forces from Ukraine with its surprise, cross-border attack into Russia’s Kursk province using Himars to knock out Russian logistics behind the lines. In the Middle East, where the U.S. and Israel are bracing for Iranian retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hamas’ political leader in Tehran last month. And of course in the Pacific, where the U.S. is beefing up its presence and arming its allies against an increasingly assertive Chinese military, which has just sent one of its three aircraft carriers to the South China Sea.

Many have warned that water might become a new global flashpoint as nations seek to secure adequate supplies of this increasingly scarce resource. Similarly, food and arable land are another potential source of global conflict.

But weather? In a new piece for Foreign Affairs, two university professors warn that efforts by various countries to slow or reverse global warming could trigger wars. Pointing to recent experiments in the U.S. to shade the planet by pumping the upper atmosphere full of particles, Washburn University law professor Craig Martin and University of Pennsylvania political science professor Scott Moore, point out that there is not international law or accord governing this kind of environmental engineering, particularly the injection of aerosols into the atmosphere—or stratospheric aerosol injection. Even if if they work, such efforts stand to drastically alter weather and climate, and not uniformly from place to place. As the two professors put it:

Unilateral SAI efforts could even become a trigger for armed conflict, as countries resort to military force to prevent what they see as dangerous tinkering with the world’s climate. To prevent such developments, the world urgently needs to establish stronger rules to govern SAI.

Turns out Poland, long an advocate of increased Western military opposition to Russia in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe, let a leading suspect in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines slip.

Readers may recall that both Nord Stream 1 and 2 were sabotaged in September 2022, eliminating the leverage gas exports gave Russia over Germany and removing the latter’s reservations about providing weapons to Ukraine. Before that, Germany had been accused of dragging its feet on promised aid to Kyiv, and it was clear that Germany’s dependence on Russian gas to heat its houses and fuel its industry was a factor. Though Nord Stream 2 was still under construction, Russia had already cut off gas through Nord Stream 1 when the pipelines were sabotaged with four explosions.

Some have accused the White House of masterminding the attacks in collaboration with Norway. But German investigators learned that a group of Ukrainian divers rented a yacht called “Andromeda” in Germany to stage the attacks, using a front company in Poland. While he may not have orchestrated the attack, U.S. President Joe Biden was reportedly aware of a Ukrainian plot to sabotage Nord Stream 1 months before it happened.

In June, German investigators issued a warrant for the arrest of a Ukrainian professional diver identified only as Volodymyr Z. (presumably not Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky). Z was reportedly living in Poland at the time. But Polish prosecutors say Z left the country before they could nab him.